Customer and technical support has long been provided by customer service or technical support personnel that interface with the customers over the telephone. More recently, a similar level of support is provided across the internet using E-mail or live chat windows. In general, these types of support address a particular issue by asking a series of questions in order to determine the nature of the issue and to identify an appropriate resolution. The support personnel ask the questions and process the answers. Therefore, the accuracy and efficiency is constrained by the skill and knowledge of a given support provider. That person may have other resources, such as a computer available to log responses and to provide information. In addition, interactive voice response systems have been used to handle these types of inquiries automatically.
Computer aided support and instruction systems have also been developed for other types of applications. For example, the PLATO® instruction system, which is commercially available from PLATO Learning, Inc., provides computer aided academic instruction. Programs have been developed to provide for interactive creation of fiction stories where a reader can interact with characters and the environment rather than simply reading a story linearly. An early example of such a text adventure is Adventure, which was written by Will Crowther, around 1975. Wizards are interactive tools that are used extensively in computer operating systems and applications to guide users through tasks such as installing and modifying computer programs. Relational agents are computer agents developed to form long-term, social-emotional relationships with users. An example of a relational agent is found in the virtual nurse project developed by Northeastern University computer science professor Timothy Bickmore.
A problem exists, however, in trying to apply the existing conversation-based customer support systems utilized by call centers to more robust conversational diagnostic tools. The existing systems utilized a tree-based hierarchy in organizing diagnostic information and in matching customer inquiries to that diagnostic information. In order to create the more robust conversational diagnostic tools, specialized authoring tools are required. However, in existing systems, authoring is not well integrated with the user experience. The ability to switch seamlessly back and forth between a user mode and an authoring mode is desired as is collaborative authoring, both between small and medium enterprises (SME-SME) and between small and medium enterprises and a user (SME-User).
A need also exists for an improved using experience. In existing conversation systems, it is difficult or impossible to change answers to questions, and questions that permit multiple answers are extremely difficult to handle. An improved system would facilitate changing previously submitted answers and automatically retracting solutions that were based on those changes. In addition, a system is desired where users discuss specific points in the conversational diagnostic tool with other users and SME and where users flag specific parts of the dialogue that may not be well received by customers.